


if you must die, sweetheart, die knowing your life was my life's best part

by everqueen



Series: And then... light. [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon, continuation of the visible bonds au!, hey fair warning yall, i kill julia sorry guys, lucretia's in there for a hot sec, oh barry is too actually lmao, this one is more of a hit than i usually do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 21:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14941514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everqueen/pseuds/everqueen
Summary: Magnus Burnsides can see color where colors have no business existing.He manages to ignore this, until he meets Julia.(title from "You" by Keaton Henson)





	if you must die, sweetheart, die knowing your life was my life's best part

Magnus Burnsides, for as long as he can remember, has always seen flashes of color where they don’t belong.

He remembers the feral dog, picked on by those bullies, and a strange, brief flash of green right after he got his ass kicked.

He remembers his sister glowing pink with her recent crush, although he can’t quite remember how that one turned out. She was happy with the girl, he thinks, although he’s not sure whether they ever got married.

He remembers others, probably, although everything is so much fuzzier from the time before Raven’s Roost, before Steven and the Hammer and Tongs.  
Before Julia.

He doesn’t remember quite how he got to that city in the sky. Julia and Steven tell him of a dark-skinned woman, tired, with brilliant white hair, who had recommended him for the apprenticeship.

(It slips his mind soon after they tell him, as many things do, but.  
Well.  
She’ll come back in later.)

He started his apprenticeship during a time of tension.

He makes an offhand comment to Julia, once, when they’re coming back from yet another mostly unsuccessful trip to the market, mostly starved of supplies after Kalen’s latest round of taxes. A city in the sky needs friends on the ground, after all, hard to come by when the prices are as high as the houses themselves.

“Everyone’s colored so bruise-y,” he remarks wryly as she hefts the single sack of flour they could afford. At her questioning look, he tries to explain further, barely able to grasp the thoughts as they float in and out of his mind. “Like fresh purple on top of that yellowy green that you get from a bruise that hasn’t had a chance to really go away, cause someone keeps adding to it.”

Julia eyes him as he loads the scant wood scraps into their wagon. “Magnus, I love you, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He waves a hand distractedly. “The colors, you know.”

She looks at him more closely, eyes drawn to the fresh scrape across his cheek from the cobblestones, when the ration guard had taken offense to him helping old Simmons pick up his knocked over cart. “No, I super fucking don’t. Should we get Alberta to check your head again?”

“What? No. Noooo. I’m okay, Jules,” he insists, and their talk turns instead to carefully considered simplicity, dropping tree woods and carving styles at certain intersections, discussing hammering techniques in front of certain stores, what they would name their dog, if ever allowed to get one. All these signaling to carefully chosen listening ears about the meeting tonight in the basement of the Hammer and Tongs.

(Well. Except the dog. That’s just Magnus.)

More people come than they expected, but it’s quickly decided.

Kalen has to go.

When they bring their hands in, mouths wry and eyes hard with determination, Magnus is sure, just for a second, that he sees an explosion of green, yellow, and blue, expanding to envelope all of them before it disappears again.

It slips his mind, as so many unexplainable things do, and he turns his thoughts to the budding revolution.

*

 

He can’t quite explain why he hurts so much when someone on their side dies, or how he knows when it happens halfway across town. But he learns, at the cost of a vicious slash across his chest, to fight through that particular pain.

It doesn’t get easier, but he does get used to it.

And there’s something about the pain that feels familiar.

 

*

 

He feels a glow of victory when they win, the yellow and green bursting behind his eyes, vibrant and joyous and so unlike the bruised, beaten shades he’d been getting from his people before.

He’s starting to expect the flashes now, and the longer he stays in Raven’s Roost, the more frequently they appear. He guesses, or thinks he does, at the meanings, and marvels with Julia at how often he’s right.

She teases that maybe he is a magic boy after all, and just needed a little divination practice.

Their delight isn’t even impeded by the news of Kalen’s escape.

 

*

 

He decides on a picnic for the perfect moment, daring her to a climbing race to the top of the Roost’s highest column, little more than a thin spire of rock with a tiny curve at the top. It’s a tiny patch of green, high among the clouds, with a particularly stubborn old birch tree and tiny, winking purple wildflowers that Magnus has never seen anywhere else. The tree often hosts ravens, from which Raven’s Roost gets its name, but they flap away at Julia vaulting over the edge with a laugh.

She wins, of course, and he watches the red, more common than not now, when he looks at her, stretch further away from him, thick and strong as a rope. He ignores the color, as he usually does nowadays, and the glimpse is gone again by the time he reaches the top.

He’d already tucked away their picnic, and they enjoy the view as they eat, talking about the shop and Steven, Raven’s Roost free from Kalen, more potential names for dogs now that there isn’t a prohibition on pets. They talk about everything and nothing at all as the sun begins to set, outlining Julia’s proud profile in liquid gold. She stands, then, one callused brown hand against the worn white bark of the birch tree, the other shading her rich brown eyes, and Magnus has never been more in love.

“Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” she asks, looking out over their city, warm and alive in the setting sun.

“Well,” Magnus says, dropping to one knee behind her and pulling out the ring case, carved himself out of a rich maple, in the shape of a duck. “There is one thing.”

“Bullshit, what could possibly be more beautif--” Julia says as she turns, and gasps when she sees him on one knee.

“You,” he says, blinking away the tears already threatening. “Julia, ever since I met you, I’ve known you were one of the best people I would ever meet. We’ve been through so much together, and I,” he stops for a moment to compose himself, to push through the tears. “Every day you inspire me to be a better leader, a better worker, a better man. I love you, Julia Waxman, with all my heart. Would you do me the greatest honor and joy of consenting to be my wife?”

Julia laughs through her own tears and drops to her knees in front of him, bringing them at eye level. “Magnus, you ass,” she says, pressing her forehead against his.

“Wait, what?”

She laughs again, leaning back, and digs around in her own pocket. Hers is a simpler box, but inside is a beautifully made golden ring, inlaid with two diamond-shaped pieces of lacquered rosewood intertwining with each other, clearly crafted by her own hand. He recognizes, even with his blurry vision, her tiny signature tongs stamped into the inside.

Magnus laughs wetly and opens the duck box, revealing the ring he painstakingly carved out of Julia’s favorite, rosewood, and inlaid with a thin, twisting line of gold.

“Magnus Burnsides, I love you, even when you steal my goddamn thunder. Will you be my husband?”

“Of course,” he says, and she slips the ring onto his finger. “Will you--”

“Oh, put it on already, of course I will,” she says, and he slides her ring on.

The rings fit perfectly, and he sees her through a haze of luminescent red.

 

*

 

It takes him a month and a half, amid all the new orders pouring in, and restoring the parts of the town damaged during the rebellion, to finish the gazebo. He politely refuses Steven’s help. The older man doesn’t press the issue, wise eyes smiling in his bearded face, while Magnus carves and sands and slots boards into place.

Their wedding is the happiest day of his life.

Everyone they know is there, and some people they don’t.

There is one woman who stands out, although Magnus would not be able to remember why for some time yet. Her hood is up, although the day is warm. Magnus seeks her out, although he’s not sure why. All he can see is a flash of golden eyes set into a dark-skinned face. There is pain and happiness in those eyes, in almost equal measures, but before he can ask, she mumbles a congratulations and disappears into the crowd.

And like so many other things, Magnus forgets.

He blinks, just after he and Julia share their first kiss as husband and wife, and for a moment all he sees is an explosion of color: blue, purple, pink, green, yellow. But swirling through it all, shimmering strong between him and his wife, is warm, vibrant red.

 

*

 

He’s a day’s ride out from Raven’s Roost when he feels a twist in his stomach, low and painful.

He yanks his horse up short, sparing only half a second to apologize to the startled animal, and whips around, staring back towards his home.

“Magnus, what’s eatin at ya, bud?” one of the fellow travelers in the caravan asks. Magnus hadn’t caught the man’s name, and for some reason the man had yet to take off his hooded red robe, so Magnus had yet to see his face.

But he pays the man no mind

A second of stillness, and that wrenching in his gut again.

“I have to go back,” he says, wheeling his horse around.

“But Magnus, the competition--”

But he’s already gone.

He rides through the night, stopping only to switch horses, making the day’s journey in a shade under seven hours.

He arrives when Raven’s Roost is still burning.

He swears he sees a stretch of the red rope, thick and shimmering, the same scarlet shade as the stain he used on the first duck he ever carved for Julia. It’s emerging from his chest, guiding him along the well loved, rubble strewn, burning path to his home.

There are other ropes, dozens it seems, stretching in different directions but all sagging down, dragging along the debris. They hang limply from his body, the torn ends burning like the ruins around him, but the red remains taut, urging him on.

He doesn’t question it, sprinting headlong towards the Hammer and Tongs, hurdling crushed buildings and flaming beams, skidding around the corner to see the devastation.

The bombs must have been centered on the support column directly below the Hammer and Tongs. He ignores fresh, stinging pain as what looks like a web of pink snaps upon seeing the destroyed shop. The red is still there, stretching into the still burning ruins, and he pours on more speed, pushing himself beyond what he thought possible.

But too late.

As Magnus reaches what was once the entrance of the stop and home he shared with his father and the love of his life, the red rope tears with a sickening lurch, gathering in the core of him and ripping apart.

And Magnus falls to his knees, howling, as Julia Burnsides dies.

**Author's Note:**

> more visible bonds au! i love this ruff boi and i also love to hurt this ruff boi. also i would die for julia burnsides make sure you jot that down
> 
> kudos/comments fuel me
> 
> thanks i love you bye


End file.
